The BookPeople holiday catalog is a big production. Every year, booksellers compete to have their essays featured along with themed photo shoots to accompany the buyers’ curated holiday gift guide. It’s not exactly a strict best of the year overview, though there’s certainly a lot of crossover with our end of year lists. It’s more designed to express our personality as a store as we offer our own gift picks for every type of reader, across age, style, and genre. The catalog really drives sales for us in November and December, so it’s worth putting in the time to make it as good as we can. It’s a fun but slightly overwhelming task. Continue reading →

As red leaves begin to appear beside their green neighbors, and cool nights draw the warmth from area lakes, it was clearly time to make my annual visit to Autumn in the hopes of getting some insight into which books published this Fall will be most worthy of our attention.
Kenny: Thank you for setting aside some time for us, Autumn.
Autumn: Certainly.
Kenny: Well, straight to it then. Perhaps you can share your top picks of the Fall season?
Autumn: Why are you speaking in generalities? Are you not aware that this is a pivotal Autumn?
Kenny: I am not. Pivotal in what way?
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Fall festival season has begun in Indiana, in which local towns celebrate sunny, parade-filled weekends with gala celebrations like “Sunflower Fest” and “Holler on the Hill Festival” and my personal favorite, “Irish Fest,” for the best brew consumed while watching dancers and sheep herding exhibitions. My family attended “Old Fashion Days”  in neighboring North Salem, Indiana, over Labor Day weekend, and we were treated to both hand-dipped ice cream and pork tenderloin sandwiches washed down with Lemon Shake Ups, as well as Main Street Bed Races and a tractor parade.  Driving back home, stomach full and thumbing through my just purchased spiral-bound church cookbook (I’m a sucker for recipes with Jello and sour cream), I thought about the fall fests that occur in the aisles of our stores this season, as likeminded folk gather to browse and (sometimes) buy books. I’m sure your stores all host the following, too:
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For major holidays, publishers release books on a reasonable timeline; Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Independence Day books arrive roughly when we expect them to start being in demand. Sure, we get some Halloween books in July and Christmas books in August, which is much earlier than I like to face the holidays, but on the whole, books ship on a schedule that makes sense. But for less specific seasonal offerings, release dates often stump booksellers.
Every year, we encounter books published mysteriously out of season: camping stories that come out in September, for instance, missing an entire summer’s worth of heightened sales. Or books perfect for summer beach reading rolling out in February, or late August, just too early or late for their optimal readership. It’s not that the books go unread, but their prime selling season seems to be lost, unnecessarily so.
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One of the perks of being the parent of young children as well as a children’s bookseller is watching the reading experience from both sides of the fence in real time. As booksellers, we hear a lot about reading level, and for good reason. Matching the right kid to the book that’s the right fit at the right time is invaluable. When I was a kid, my mom gave me The Wind in the Willows to read on my own just a little too early, perhaps forgetting the complexity of the language within. Even though I was a voracious reader, that book sat on my shelf for a long time, untouched, as I refused to return to the story that had daunted me. But then, at a certain point, it became my favorite.
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This time of year I take a long swim in a lake before work. I was out on the water yesterday, thinking about how one of my favorite settings for a book involves taking the world as we know it and twisting one of its key elements to great effect. In the Bartimaeus trilogy, for example, the one twist involves England’s aristocracy being composed of magicians, which form the governing elite. That allowed for a fascinating exploration of class issues.
What about us, though? Was there a tweak that would be worth considering? Then it hit me. What if our government was run by children’s book characters instead of actual people? Which character would I choose to be president?
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Summer has (sadly) ended for our school-aged crowd, and summer reading prizes are packed away in the stock room. Waldo has been found, sand toys are banished to the secondary storage unit (otherwise known as my garage), and we’re hearing more about school assigned reading in the aisles at the store. As sad as all this loss of “our” kids’ free time makes our staff, there is much excitement about the start of book club season at the shop, and preparations are underway to host both familiar friends and some new groups this fall.
Our store book clubs vary in frequency, length, and commitment. Mostly, we just post the schedule and invite kids (and parents) to jump in any time. Some of our customers have been “clubbing” with us for years, and kids move up through early chapter, middle grade, and young adult groups. We have one mother/daughter group that started when the girls were in kindergarten, and have met (mostly) monthly ever since. When they graduated from 8th grade, I attended their school convocation, and plan to be a blubbering mess at their high school baccalaureate in two years. We have made our way through a lot of chapters together, both in our pages and in our lives.
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On Sunday, three visitors strode into the store with purpose. I had a hunch they might be teachers, because the children’s books they asked for were particularly interesting, recent, and a couple of them are still slightly off the radar of the general reading public. It turned out these field-savvy literary savants were indeed teachers, and one of them, Cindy Schwind from Rochester, N.Y., was on a very special mission: to gather books from indie bookstores throughout Vermont for a nationwide Twitter raffle for teachers.
“We’re on an indie book crawl,” she said. “We did five stores on Friday, seven stores on Saturday, and six stores today. You’re our final stop on the tour.”
Wow! That’s one more than a complete haiku of bookstores, and includes more stores than even I’ve been to in my own state. I had to know more about her idea for the book crawl.
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In the footsteps of my fellow ShelfTalker bloggers this week, I bring you: Bookstore Bingo, the BookPeople Edition! Some stories are my own, others have been collected from other BookPeople colleagues, but they all happened in our store (well, except for the extra credit square).
The most obvious result of my informal survey was that it’s not just Cynthia’s store. The bathroom is really where it’s at.
The Once Upon a Potty Routine:
Has anyone seen the bathroom? Where, oh where’s the bathroom? You must have a bathroom. May I show you to the bathroom? Why, of course we have a bathroom. You have to have a bathroom! Do you have a bathroom?
Why, yes, we do! Continue reading →

We’ve come to Thursday of this week’s ShelfTalker BINGO grid. Each day this week one of us ShelfTalkers has been setting down some heard-at-the-store standouts  (see Monday’s squares,  Tuesday’s squares, and Wednesday’s squares). Today’s theme is MOSTS, meaning Most exemplary customer declamations made at DDG Booksellers recently.
Before we get to recently, though, we’ll start with…
Most memorable quote of all time: (An 11 year old at the register) – “Book writers blow my mind. They just tap tap tap all day long so I can read what they wrote all night long.”
Most dramatic declaration. “She died!” ( A teen customer had just finished The Bird and the Blade and was shattered that the lead character dies at the end.)
Most judicious observation: “There are people, friends of mine, who I considered to be politically and ecologically conscious who I was shocked to learn had purchased bottled water from Amazon.”

 
Most untrue statement: “What do you mean it’s not available in paperback? Amazon is selling paperback copies for $11.99.” (that turned out to be an ebook-only title)
Most haunting exchange:
Customer: Where is your true haunting section?
Clare: We have several books over here in the Maine section.
Customer: Just these? ! I think you have a whole big section of them somewhere in the store.
Clare: I’ll check on that. (Goes to the computer and then checks in with me to learn that what we have in Maine is all there is.)
Clare: No I’m afraid these are the only ones we have.
Customer: Then can someone else help me?
Most TMI statement: “I had to stop at the gas station to check my tire pressure. that tpms button can really drive you crazy. Last week I got a nail on the outside of my right front tire. I got it fixed but I’m worried that it didn’t seal properly.”
Most unexpected customer demonstration: A 45 year old man on all fours to demonstrate a vehicular push toy to his wife.
Most lacking in detail. “Order all the rest of those maps in that series” (this was the opening of a telephone call with no precursor or indicator as to who the caller was)
Most striking compliment: She likes Princess Pulverizer almost as much as Princess in Black. (That is, a VERY great deal)
Most likely to make a bookseller blush: “I knew Spinning Silver was coming out, but I waited until I came to visit this summer to buy it from you.”
Most perplexing: How long will it take my son to solve this puzzle? (The puzzle was the Perplexus puzzle)